Does a Bee Know the Summer Is Ending?

by Joe Broadmeadow

There is a bee working the goldenrod at the edge of the wood, and she has no idea what month it is.

She moves the way she moved in July, with the same blunt urgency, the same disinterest in anything besides the next blossom. The light has changed around her. It comes in lower now and longer; the gold in it is the kind of gold you only get after Labor Day. She does not look up at it. She works.

So I stood there a while and asked the question a retired cop asks about everything: what does the evidence say?

The evidence says the colony knows, even if the bee does not. As the days shorten, the hive begins to change its own arithmetic. The queen slows her laying. The drones, useless now, get shouldered out the door by sisters with no more patience for passengers. The workers born in September are not built like the workers born in July. A summer bee burns herself out in six weeks. A bee born into the cold season carries more fat in her body and can live for months, because somebody has to keep the cluster warm until March.

None of this arrives as knowledge. No bee stands at the entrance board and says, well, here it comes. The hive simply reads the light and the temperature and the thinning of the fields, and it prepares. The way a body prepares. The way your shoulders know a storm before the radar does.

The crickets do the same honest arithmetic. Count the chirps for fourteen seconds, add forty, and you have the temperature in Fahrenheit, close enough for government work. They are not counting. They are just cold, and the cold slows them down, and the slowing is the whole message. Every September the crickets tell you the truth in a language they do not know they are speaking.

We are the only ones in those woods who know.

That is the difference, and it is not a small one. The bee has the work. We have the calendar, and the memory, and the terrible arithmetic of our own. We can stand in a driveway in the first week of September, looking at a folded beach chair and a cooler with an inch of gray water in the bottom, and understand exactly what we are looking at. Not the end of a season. The end of this one. The specific one.

The summer with those particular kids at that particular age, who will never again be precisely this tall, or this delighted by a sprinkler, or this willing to fall asleep in the car on the way home.

Next summer will come. Everybody says so, and everybody is right. But it will be a different cast, a different set of knees, a different version of you standing at the grill. We all get a finite number of them, and after a certain point in life you stop needing anyone to remind you of the count.

For a long time I thought the bee had the better arrangement. Ignorance looked like mercy. She will not see the spring, and she does not appear to mind, and there is a kind of peace in that I have envied.

I have come around.

The bee cannot stay one extra minute in the goldenrod because she does not know it is worth staying for. We can. Knowing the summer is ending is precisely what makes a person linger on the back steps after the plates are cleared, listening to the crickets get slower, and letting the kids have twenty more minutes because twenty more minutes is suddenly the most valuable currency in the world.

The knowing is what makes us pay attention. It is what turns an ordinary Thursday in August into something we will still be able to see thirty years later, in detail, with our eyes closed. Well, some of us well. Some of us have more than thirty behind us, but the memories persist.

So the answer is no.

The bee does not know the summer is ending. She works the last of the flowers in the last of the light, and she will be gone before the first hard frost, and the hive will go on without her, warm in the dark, waiting on a spring she was never promised.

We get the harder gift. We get to know.

Stay out on the steps a while longer. The light is going, and it is beautiful, and it was always going to be.